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Creative Conversations/digital: Citlali Fabián with James Estrin

Wednesday, March 10 | 12PM

Artist Citlali Fabián will join New York Times staff photographer and writer James Estrin for a conversation focusing on Fabián’s series Mestiza (2014–18), which is included in FotoFest’s current exhibition, Public Life: Home and the people who live there. For her series Mestiza, artist Citlali Fabián created collaborative portraits with women from her inner circle, her mother, relatives, and friends as a way to explore their identity and ancestral heritage. To create these portraits, Fabián utilized a nineteenth-century photographic process known as ambrotype in order to confront and challenge the colonial photographic histories that seek to capture and contain indigenous narratives, identities, and culture.

About the guests
Citlali Fabián is a Oaxacan artist whose work explores notions of identity in relation to analogue photographic practices including nineteenth-century photographic processes. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Mexico, the US, Spain, and Argentina. Fabián’s most recent body of work, Mestiza, was featured in the New York Times Lens blog and selected as one of the thirteen favorite Lens stories of 2018. Her work has appeared in publications including Remezcla, Revista Cuartoscuro magazine, and I-M magazine. She is a member of Women Photograph and Natives Photograph collectives. Fabián’s work is in collections around the globe including Toledo/INBA and the Patricia Conde Collection in Mexico City, and the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University in San Marcos. She is a recent graduate of the MFA program at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Mexico City.

James Estrin is a New York Times staff photographer and writer. He was a founder and co-editor of Lens, The New York Times photography blog and was a part of the team who won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for the series, How Race Is Lived In America. Estrin was the co-executive producer of the documentary film Under Fire: The Untold Story of Pfc. Tony Vaccaro which appeared on HBO in November 2016. He is an adjunct professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

Image: Citlali Fabián, Adriana, 2015. From the series Mestiza. Inkjet Print. Courtesy of the artist.